The Book of the Damned

"Iron cannon ball." It was found in a manure heap, in Sussex, after a thunderstorm. However, Mr. Symons argues pretty reasonably, it seems to me, that, given a cannon ball in a manure heap, in the first place, lightning might be attracted by it, and, if seen to strike there, the untutored mind, or mentality below the average, would leap or jump, or proceed with less celerity, to the conclusion that the iron object had fallen. Except that--if every farmer isn't upon very familiar ground--or if every farmer doesn't know his own manure heap as well as Mr. Symons knew his writing desk-- Then comes the instance of a man, his wife, and his three daughters, at Casterton, Westmoreland, who were looking out at their lawn, during a thunderstorm, when they "considered," as Mr. Symons expresses it, that they saw a stone fall from the sky, kill a sheep, and bury itself in the ground. They dug. They found a stone ball. Symons: Coincidence. It had been there in the first place. This object was exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Meteorological Society by Mr. C. Carus-Wilson. It is described in the Journal's list of exhibits as a "sandstone" ball. It is described as "sandstone" by Mr. Symons. Now a round piece of sandstone may be almost anywhere in the ground--in the first place--but, by our more or less discreditable habit of prying and snooping, we find that this object was rather more complex and of material less commonplace. In snooping through Knowledge, Oct. 9, 1885, we read that this "thunderstone" was in the possession of Mr. C. Carus-Wilson, who tells the story of the witness and his family--the sheep killed, the burial of something in the earth, the digging, and the finding. Mr. C. Carus-Wilson describes the object as a ball of hard, ferruginous quartzite, about the size of a cocoanut, weight about twelve pounds. Whether we're feeling around for significance or not, there is a suggestion not only of symmetry but of structure in this object: it had an external shell, separated from a loose nucleus. Mr. Carus-Wilson attributes this cleavage to unequal cooling of the mass.